Grand River Hospital Chooses BBM Protected and BES12 to Enable Secure Communications

Today at the eHealth Conference, BlackBerry announced that Grand River Hospital has chosen BBM Protected and BES12 to enable secure communications for their clinicians and staff.

Grand River Hospital has a mixed mobile deployment model, with corporate-deployed BlackBerry devices for management and staff and a bring-your-own-device (BYOD) model for their physicians and remaining staff.

Grand River Hospital provides acute care, rehabilitation services and supportive care to more than 700,000 residents. They have a mixed mobile deployment model, with corporate-deployed BlackBerry devices for management and staff and a bring-your-own-device (BYOD) model for their physicians and remaining staff. Grand River Hospital chose BBM Protected for enhanced security of communications among doctors and staff where messages reference private patient information.

Kathleen Lavoie is Grand River Hospital’s Corporate Director of Information Management and Chief Privacy Officer and it’s her responsibility to makes sure the hospital meets all of its legal responsibilities for the safekeeping of patient information.

She also has an interest in helping care providers get the latest health details so they can support their patients.

“In addition to high-quality care, the security of personal health information is one of the most important responsibilities we must fulfill for our patients,” she explains.

“Everyday text messaging would not work for us. We need a service that’s secure and encrypted so our patients’ health information remains private.”

When BlackBerry introduced GRH to BBM Protected, Kathleen and her team put the application through its paces. She wanted to make sure the system could handle the rigorous privacy laws that Ontario hospitals must follow.

“We have ten privacy principles we follow for patient information. These cover everything from how we safeguard communication to how we retain it, and other steps to ensure its security,” adds Kathleen.

Following months of cooperative work between BlackBerry and GRH, Kathleen gave the new system a “thumbs up” from a privacy perspective. Grand River has now become one of the first Canadian customers to sign on to BBM Protected.

“We have been testing the tool between our information services and health information portfolios. We’re very excited about the next step, which will involve bringing it to our health providers,” she explains.

BBM Protected provides an additional layer of encryption to BBM messages, while using the familiar and reliable BBM interface used by millions of people around the world. BBM Protected works on iOS, Android(TM), and BlackBerry smartphones.

“We needed to give our physicians and staff a secure mobile communications tool for real-time collaboration about patient status,” said Gary Higgs, Chief Information Officer of Grand River Hospital.

“We considered multiple options, but BBM Protected was the ideal fit for our requirements, as it’s secure, easy to use and platform agnostic, allowing us to deploy it across the range of mobile devices in our environment. The BlackBerry solution including BBM Protected and BES12 allows us to maintain the security and privacy of our patient data while empowering our users with the tools they need to provide the best possible care to our patients.”

Grand River Hospital also plans on using BES12 for enterprise mobility management (EMM) to securely manage their deployment of BlackBerry 10 smartphones and enable access for physicians who use their own mobile devices such as iOS and Android smartphones to access the hospital network.

BES12 can manage any mobile deployment model such as BYOD, Corporate Owned Personally Enabled (COPE) and Corporate Owned Business Only (COBO), and seamlessly supports iOS, Android, Windows Phone, BlackBerry OS and BlackBerry 10 smartphones and tablets, as well as a wide range of Samsung KNOX and Android for Work smartphones and tablets.

“With BBM Protected and BES12, Grand River Hospital is able to provide a secure communications solution and support a mixed deployment model, including BYOD, while reducing the vulnerability of sensitive patient data and maintaining compliance with regulations such as PHIPA,” said Mark Wilson, Chief Evangelist, BlackBerry.

“BBM Protected gives staff a powerful productivity tool to communicate securely with their contacts inside and outside of the organization.”